


Jurassic Life

by afterandalasia



Series: Jurassic Life: The Dinosaur Sanctuary Series [1]
Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Animal Shelter, Dinosaurs, Established Claire Dearing/Owen Grady, F/M, Happy Ending, Raptor Parent Owen, Referenced Harm to Animals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 21:47:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6095071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dinosaurs, almost to a species, are endangered. Even those that remain are vulnerable. And for Claire Dearing and Owen Grady, running a sanctuary for dinosaurs is a struggle, and balancing the books is the hardest part of all. From television cameras to rescues, somehow, they muddle through.</p><p>And then someone sends them footage of the unthinkable. And they cannot let it go.</p><p> </p><p>(Rating for referenced animal cruelty.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jurassic Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Darkstar1991](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkstar1991/gifts).



> Inspired by, and based on, the 1997 TV show _Monkey Business_ which chronicled the real-life development of monkey and ape sanctuary _Monkey World_ in the UK. It follows the amazing work of Jim and Alison Cronin in rescuing animals and working abroad for animal rights. In 2007, the show relaunched as _Monkey Life_ , and is still onrunning.
> 
>  _Monkey Business_ has recently been showing on UK TV, which is what prompted the writing of this fic! Thank you to Darkstar1991 for encouraging me to watch it.

She knew roughly what the email said from the moment that she saw Owen's face. It was that softening of his eyes, the way that he leant in towards the screen.  
  
"Where is she?" she said.  
  
Owen tried to look nonchalant as he turned in his chair, but the way that he had jumped gave him away. Folding her arms, Claire simply waited for the inevitable sigh before he answered.  
  
"Costa Rica."  
  
Frowning, Claire crossed to lean over his shoulder and read the email for herself. Owen had already opened up the attachments, and it clearly showed the velociraptor in a cage too small for her, dirty and thin.  
  
"She's stunning," said Owen softly.  
  
Claire put a hand on his shoulder, pressing her lips together. She knew exactly what was running through his mind, and for the most part she agreed. It was unthinkable to let this velociraptor live in the way that it was, and it deserved to be rescued. But unlike Owen's knee-jerk approach, she knew that they had to think things through.  
  
"We need to do this properly," she said. Even she would admit that it sounded stern, but she wasn't sure that it was quite so necessary for Owen to slump down in the chair as if she had started giving orders. "Go to the government, talk to them. No plotting SEAL-style raids in the middle of the night."  
  
"That was once," Owen retorted. "And we were drunk. We probably wouldn't have actually done it."  
  
"It's the _probably_ that continues to concern me," said Claire, but could not help the fond edge to her voice. She squeezed his shoulder. "We can do this."  
  
"The budget's already fucked." Owen pushed his chair back from the desk, making Claire straighten up, and waved a hand in frustration. "I want do to this but... damn it, we just don't have the money for it."  
  
"You know how we could do it," she said.  
  
Owen rolled his eyes. "Sure, let camera crews and presenters-"  
  
"They want us to do the presenting ourselves."  
  
"Like we've got time for that-"  
  
"Owen, we need this," said Claire flatly. The mere fact that they were having this argument at ten at night was probably evidence of that. "We're all run off our feet. We're running on a shoestring. You said yourself that the raptors' enclosure needs work, and if we really want to look at getting the T-Rex into the breeding programme then we need to expand her space as well. You and Barry already work fourteen-hour days. I've got thirty emails to answer before I can even thinking about sleeping. We need more funds, and the TV company are offering good money, and an administrative assistant, just to film our work."  
  
"Me? On television?" He stretched his legs out in front of him, one ankle crossed over the other, and spread his arms. He was wearing a grubby old shirt whose white had long since become cream, and grey combats that had seen better days. One of the pockets had been entirely ripped off by raptors more than two years ago, and most of the buttons had been lost to compys. "Yeah, that'll end well."  
  
"We take this offer, or we don't get to save that raptor," she said, with a gesture to the screen. The raptor's eyes stared out at them, wary and damaged by everything it had been through. Even Claire, who dealt with the office work and the lawyers more than she did with the dinosaurs, recognised the hurt there. "Owen, we have to do something, or I'm not sure we'll make it another three years."  
  
With each time that she raised it, she knew that she was getting a little closer to having him agree. He knew that she was right, they both knew that, but he hated admitting that he was wrong and hated the idea of being on television. His thoughts on television cameras about aligned with Claire's thoughts on dinosaur dung. Something better left to everyone else.  
  
Owen looked at the raptor for a long time, propping his chin on his hand. They were his greatest weakness, always had been. When their first raptor, Clever Girl, had died, it had wracked him to the core.  
  
"Okay," he said finally. "Talk to the TV people."  
  
She leant in and kissed him, on the cheek first where it was turned towards her and then on his lips as they were freed to her. His hand slipped up to the back of her neck and he leant up to deepen the kiss; she answered in kind, leaning one hand in the centre of his chest. It was only with regret that she pulled away.  
  
"I have to get those emails," she said.  
  
"Get them later." Owen grabbed her waist and pulled her into his lap before she had time to protest, and she tried to look affronted and she slapped his chest lightly. "They'll still be there in the morning." He kissed her jaw, one hand on her back and the other roaming over her thigh.  
  
"As will a dozen more." She pried herself out of his hold and stepped back out of his reach. It didn't stop him from smiling, though. "We'll continue then."  
  
"Oh, you bet we will," said Owen, pushing himself back over to his desk. He was smirking. Claire waited until he couldn't see her face before she let herself smile as well.  
  
  
  
  
  
Owen wore board shorts for their first day of filming, and Claire despaired of him. Somehow, though, it made the public like him more; her new assistant, Zara, reported that people found him 'relatable' and 'personable'.  
  
It didn't stop Claire despairing, but did make Owen unbearably smug that night.  
  
  
  
  
  
From the moment that he met the newest velociraptor, Claire knew that Owen was in love again. Not that it was worn on his sleeve - the folks behind the cameras must have had a clue, the way that they watched him as he approached the raptor for the first time, but it had taken years for Claire to be able to read this well.  
  
She didn't have a name from her former owner, and Claire expected Owen to announce that she would be Foxtrot, to continue the phonetic naming which was just one more part of the military that he could not shake. At the outside, she might have guessed at Beta, the female leader of the pack that Owen had been looking for all this time.  
  
"Blue," Owen breathed. He ran his hand over her cheek, and she stopped struggling against the specialist cage that they had bought for her. Golden eyes fixed on him, and her breathing slowed. "Her name is Blue."  
  
There were scars on her skin from where she had been mistreated, and the skin on her sides was hollow. Too many bones close to the skin. There was fire in her, and she should live, but Claire saw the legal battle as well as the history on which she knew Owen would focus.  
  
"Let's get her going," she said. "Let the vet get to work."  
  
  
  
  
  
"Raptors are a really specialist species," Claire said to the camera, as they stood outside the vetinary surgery and let the doctors do their work. "There are only a handful of places in the world that can handle raptors, actually fewer than _Tyrannosaurus rex_. It's not just a matter of space; they're so intelligent that you really need to balance enrichment and precautions to make sure that it's safe."  
  
"Fewer than T-Rex?" came the prompt, from her narrator. He had been chosen for his voice, but Claire had found that they worked surprisingly well together.  
  
Claire nodded. This was her role, to talk to the camera, while Owen was in with the vets alongside the new raptor. " _Tyrannosaurus rex_ is powerful, but there's been work with them for at least two generations to try to stabilise wild populations.  
  
"Raptors are less endangered, and more difficult, so there really hasn't been the work with them. Barry and Owen made some breakthroughs before Jurassic World even opened, but having the structure of the park has really opened up opportunities for them."  
  
She paused, and looked back through the window again. It was mostly for herself, and only a little bit for the cameras; she always wanted the best for the dinosaurs, and Owen's clear adoration of this raptor had only made that instinct stronger. But she had to keep an eye on the outside world, in a way that Owen could not.  
  
"One of our next projects is going to be to revamp the raptor enclosure," she said. "There's enough room for the new raptor, Blue, as well, but once she's back to full health and the pack structure is sorted out again it might start feeling a bit tight. We've got an area of land set aside, but finding the time is always an issue."  
  
On camera, they had agreed not to mention the money issues. But just the knowledge that they _were_ making a television series seemed to be sparking interest, and there had been a small increase in visitor numbers. She was hoping that there would be more once it started to air.  
  
"There's always some sort of crisis?" said the narrator.  
  
She smiled. "Crisis is overstating it. But working with animals is never boring, that's for sure. Especially when you're dealing with endangered ones like _Tyrannosaurus rex_ and _Microceratus gobiensis_ , just because there's been less research, and we're more likely to run into things that we haven't previously experienced.  
  
"It's a learning curve," Claire concluded. "It's always a learning curve. But we're here for the animals, when all's said and done."  
  
  
  
  
  
It turned out that Blue was just the beta that Owen was looking for. She made the girls act like _raptors_ again, he said, and there was a pride and an optimism in his voice made Claire remember all again why she fell for this impetuous, infuriating man. For all his tendency to act first, and take the consequences, rather than think it deeply through, he could see possibilities in anything.  
  
By the time that the first episode aired, Claire and Zara between them could barely keep up with the phone calls and emails that they were receiving. Hits on the website rocketed. It was late spring, perfect weather for visitors and dinosaurs alike, and it was not long before the site was bustling in a way that it had not been for some years.  
  
After the cameras had caught Owen doing his clicker-training work with Blue and the others, people were fascinated. He began to put on daily shows, accompanied with blunt speeches about how difficult and dangerous it was to work with dinosaurs, especially raptors, at all. The last thing that he wanted was for them to be seen as _pets_. That was what so much of their work had been about.  
  
Blue thrived, and Owen slowly grew more used to dealing with crowds in the same way that he had slowly grown used to the cameras.  
  
  
  
  
  
"Pity they're all female," he said, as they stood one sunset and watched the raptors working on their latest enrichment. Pinecones smeared with blood and minced meat were an idea taken from big cat shelters, but Owen had looked into it and then tried it out on the raptors. It had proved an instant hit.  
  
"Oh?" said Claire.  
  
"Wild packs have males that come and go as well," he said, with a wave down at them.  
  
"Uh-huh," she said dryly. "Not that you'd be hoping for hatchlings."  
  
Owen made a scoffing sound. "I said nothing of the sort."  
  
They'd agreed long ago that they didn't want children, but young dinosaurs could be another thing entirely. Charlie had been the youngest, undersized for her six years when they had rescued her, and Owen had babied her even after she had hit her growth spurt and her strength had come back. He was there for every Microceratus clutch, although to be fair Claire had also been present for a couple of those when it had been all-hands-on-deck to make sure that every endangered animal survived its hatching.  
  
"You never know, the _Tyrannosaurus rex_ breeding programme might come up with a good match for us." Their T-Rex was low on the list with her advancing age, but if there was a good genetic match then she might just get her chance to have offspring anyway. "And if you want your shoelaces eaten again, there's always the compys."  
  
  
  
  
  
They were midway through filming the fourth season when the grainy footage arrived in their inbox. A tip-off from a member of the public, bad mobile phone footage, and Claire told them immediately to shut off the television cameras.  
  
"What is that?" she breathed, pulling a chair over beside Owen and sinking into it without taking her eyes off the screen.  
  
On the screen, in poor quality and low light, a huge dinosaur loomed in the darkness of what looked like a warehouse. It was pale, looming, with a large head and body, but longer forearms than would be on any _Tyrannosaur_.  
  
Owen shook his head. "I don't know."  
  
Claire's heart clenched in her chest, and she finally looked away from the footage to Owen's face. The colour had drained from his face, and he seemed frozen in place, staring almost haunted at the screen. "Owen?" she in an undertone, then took a deep breath and turned to the television crew. "I'm really sorry, we've got something here that we're not quite sure about yet. We need to talk about it alone for a while. I believe that one of the Triceratops is to have a check-up today, though, if you wanted to talk to our vets about setting up for that."  
  
She gave them a firm but fake smile, and to their credit it took them hardly any time at all to clear the office. Even Zara, at a nod from Claire, let herself out and closed the door behind them. The room fell gently silent, apart from the hum of the fan.  
  
"Owen?" she brushed her hand down his arm to twine her fingers into his. "What is it?"  
  
With his free hand, he reached up and rewound the footage, pausing on a frame that showed a long whipping tail. "There, in the top left. The sign."  
  
It was blurry, white words on a blue background. "I don't recognise it," said Claire.  
  
"I do. It's a company called InGen. Ten years ago, before we met, a man named Vic Hoskins," the name fell crisply from his lips, "approached me to ask about raptors. Specifically... he was asking whether it was possible to breed a raptor and a T-rex."  
  
" _What_?"  
  
"I thought he was mad, at the time." He shook his head. "But _look_ at her, Claire. The size is Tyrannosaur, but the arms are too long - they're raptor, look. And that snout profile is something in between."  
  
"That's absurd," said Claire. Her specialism might have been in the business, and not the animals, but even she could see how ridiculous that was. "It would be an intergeneric hybrid. There haven't even _been_ hybrids found in the wild, not outside Diplodocinae. And they're a lot closer in size, in range, in-"  
  
" _Claire_ ," said Owen intensely, his fingers tightening around hers. "Look at her. There's no known dinosaur species that colour, nothing that has that shape. And that symbol is InGen."  
  
"Why?" she said, distantly. " _How_?"  
  
Owen waved a hand at the screen. "Black market velociraptor sperm? Hell if I know. And as for why..." he trailed off grimly. "People want to see the biggest, the scariest. As if the dinosaurs we already have aren't frightening enough."  
  
"You want to get her out," said Claire. It wasn't even a question: a warehouse, the dark, the enclosed space. Just watching the video felt claustrophobic. She could not even imagine what it was like for the dinosaur itself. _Herself_. So many of Jurassic World's dinosaurs were female that they all deferred to it if they didn't know the sex.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
Claire ran a hand through her hair. She could feel the effect of the straighteners starting to wear off, her natural waves coming back in. "This is obviously clandestine material. It will never hold up in court. I'm not even sure how existing Costa Rican law would apply to an artifically-created hybrid."  
  
"All the species of _Tyrannosaur_ are endangered. Velociraptors are vulnerable. This thing is one of a kind, I don't think it gets more endangered than that," Owen said, with a sharp wave at the screen and his voice roughened with frustration.  
  
They both knew, though, that going up against people who kept illegal dinosaurs would have the people trying to find any legal loophole in existence to get to keep their illicit pets. "We need to talk to a Costa Rican specialist," said Claire, with finality. "And I think that it might be time for you to talk to Vic Hoskins again."  
  
  
  
  
  
It took every ounce of Owen's self-restraint to pretend to be friends with Vic Hoskins again. On a holiday with his wife, Claire heard him say down the phone; did they want to meet up and chat sometime? How was he doing? Oh, Hoskins hadn't heard that 'that old park' was doing well? (Claire had to put a hand on Owen's thigh, watched his hands curl into fists.) Yeah, maybe they could chat about things.  
  
He kept a recorder in his pocket, and Claire listened sat in the hotel room and listened through the litany of drinks. The television crew were with her, partially because she needed Zara's company just then and partially because she wanted every second of this as recorded as possible. Zara's jaw had dropped from the moment that they had explained what they found and reset for filming; for a long time it had seemed that nobody on the crew had known what to say at all.  
  
They waited just long enough to get a reference to owning 'something impressive', and the police were right alongside them.  
  
Vic Hoskins called Owen an astonishing number of names and, when Owen walked away, went to throw a punch. Claire got there first, and broke a nail when her fist made contact with Hoskins's face.  
  
The cameras caught it all. Claire only realised this as Hoskins hit the ground, blood dripping from his nose and a look of complete and absolute bewilderment on his face. She looked up to see Owen looking impressed and just a little turned on, and the cameraman nodding appreciatively.  
  
"And that is why they call Nature a woman," said the narrator.  
  
  
  
  
  
The hybrid did not even have a name when they moved it into the T-rex's old paddock. When they finally managed to get it clean, it was not just pale but white, and when they fed it properly the scales became glistening rather than dull and scuffed. There were scars on its face, and its teeth were ragged and uneven but they could not even get close enough to look at them. It snarled and tried to attack anyone that went in to see it.  
  
Even Owen was not sure whether they could fix the psychological scars.  
  
For months, they had to keep her away from the public; she was too volatile and too smart together, attacking the glass and going into a frenzy. Its roars, half screams, echoed across the park at night, and Claire would wake to find Owen already standing at the window and looking down over the park.  
  
Even after the court case was complete, and the Costa Rican authorities officially - and with some relief - handed the hybrid over to the park, it seemed that they could make no progress.  
  
"I'm going to take Blue with me," said Owen finally, as they watched the compys savaging a beef carcass.  
  
Claire thought of Blue, their long-sought velociraptor beta, larger than them but still nothing compared to the larger dinosaurs they had. "Are you sure that's a good idea? I don't want any of the dinosaurs getting hurt."  
  
"We'll stay outside the cage, at first," he said, and folded his arms across his chest. "But I'm starting to think that she's not like the T-Rex. She can't handle being alone. She needs a _pack_."  
  
There were no others like her in the world. But perhaps Owen was right, thought Claire, slipping her arm around his waist. The raptors were the closest thing the hybrid had to a family.  
  
"And she needs a name," Owen added.  
  
"She doesn't even have a species name," said Claire, with a shake of her head. "But she has survived a lot. Indomitable, I guess." She looked up at Owen. "Indominus rex?"  
  
He snorted. "Really. Indominus?"  
  
"Pronouncable. Complimentary. I can think of worse."  
  
Within two days, he had shortened it to Indy. That was his way of agreeing, Claire supposed.  
  
  
  
  
  
Barry called her, excitement in his voice, about half an hour after Owen went into the pen with Blue for the first time. He refused to tell her too much, and Claire ran through the park, her heart in her throat even though he would say if there was something wrong, he was trustworthy, he was one of the ones who had been there from the beginning.  
  
She arrived, breathless, the television crew struggling to keep up with her, and stopped short at the sight that met her. Owen was standing in the hybrid's cage, his hands brushing its huge snout, Blue between them like a chaperone watching over them both.  
  
Claire's knees went weak, and she had to catch at the bars to hold herself completely upright. There was a look of raw awe on Owen's face, and the hybrid - the Indominus, she had called it that, but suddenly the name was too big and formal and Indy really did seem more like a name for it - was bowing its head to him. Her head.  
  
She put a hand to her mouth, and felt the prick of tears behind her eyes. Even after so many years, so many rescues, she had still thought that maybe this one would be beyond them. That maybe there would be one dinosaur that they could not save.  
  
She had never been so glad to be wrong.


End file.
